Written in Blood
University of Pennsylvania 2011 GRA Conference
The University of Pennsylvania's Graduate Romanic Association is pleased to announce the 2011 GRA Conference, entitled “Written in Blood.” The conference will be held on March 19th in Philadelphia.
Blood lies at the heart of numerous areas of discourse, from the medical to the mystical, from the sexual to the social. It can function as a sign, whether in the form of a blood oath or as forensic evidence. It is a dominant motif in slasher films and Gothic novels, as well as hagiographic texts and war stories. More broadly, blood also serves as a metaphor for identifiers that bind groups together through genealogies of family and tribe. Embedded in the notion of blood as unifier, however, is the potential for violence upon the Other in the form of vendettas, torture, murder, and warfare. This conference aims to provide thoughtful analyses of the many roles that blood plays in cultural production in the Romance languages, such as the trans-generational narrative of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Buendía family, the river of blood crossed in Canto XII of Dante's Inferno, or virgin sacrifice in the medieval Queste del Saint-Graal.
To foster interdisciplinary participation, we encourage papers in English, but welcome submissions in any of the Romance languages. Potential areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Genealogies: royal families, lines of descent, family trees
- Religious symbolism: the Eucharist, martyrdom, relics, the Holy Grail
- Genetics/reproduction: blood traits, inheritance, theories of degeneration, incest, miscegenation, madness in the blood
- Identity: blood as sign of kinship, tribal bonds, ethnicity, nationality, blood/racial purity
- Cinematic depictions of blood: slasher/horror films, bloodbaths, snuff films, war films
- Blood in medical discourse: humors, bloodletting, wounds, disease, pollution, anemia
- Mystic power of blood: witchcraft, alchemy, blood rituals, sacrifice, suicide
- Blood as metaphor for urban centers: arteries, circulation
- Coded blood: masculinity/femininity, virgin blood, menstruation, blood of the Other, blood as fetish
- Bonds of blood: warfare, blood brothers, blood sport
- Vampirism/parasitism: consumption of blood, vampires in the media, blood transfusion
- Blood as sign: blood oaths, testimony, signed/sealed in blood, forensics
- Guilt: vendettas, blood money, blood on one's hands, crime novels, murder, genocide
- Blood and borders: colonialism, the exotic, tropical diseases
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract to pennconference@gmail.com by January 15th.